Jasper County Democrat, Volume 1, Number 15, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 July 1898 — Origin of the Word "Sincere.” [ARTICLE]

Origin of the Word "Sincere.”

Nothing is more fascinating than stories of the birth of words. Take “sincere,” for example. Your letters to acquaintances are signed “sincerely yours;” you speak with admiration of this man’s sincerity of purpose, that woman’s sincerity of gaze. You question those who flatter you. “Sincerely, do you mean it?” you ask them, humbly. If you are an erudite person you know that sincere comes from two Latin words—sine, meaning “without," and cera, meaning “wax.” But how did “without wax” ever come to mean honest, whole-souled, direct and true? Long, long ago in Rome there were tricks of trade, as there are now. Furniture dealers made chairs and tables of unseasoned wood and in course of time the ‘wood cracked. Whereupon the wily dealers filled the crevices with wax and sold their wares to the guileless Roman populace. But there was one old woman—she must have been a new woman, too, for she was engaged in trade—who scorned the device. Her woods were properly seasoned. They did not warp. She used no wax to hide defects. She proclaimed far and wide that her wares were “sine cera.”—New York Evening Journal.